Names are important things. The former Kellie May Xiong has, according to her divorce petition, filed to separate from her husband, Derek Chauvin, the Minneapolis police officer who asphyxiated George Floyd for however many minutes it took to kill him and then kept his knee down for several more minutes after that. Mr. Chauvin has previously been involved in three shootings and at least 10 conduct complaints, and he has been charged with second-degree murder. Ms. Chauvin is not seeking spousal support — that is, money. She just wants to change her name, a signal of family loyalty.
Names are also important for enriching our vocabulary. In the First Army of the French Republic, there was a soldier so devoted to the patriotic cause that his name rings down through the etymological ages for stupid, unthinkingly self-assured faith in the superiority of one’s own group. His name was Nicolas Chauvin, and we get the word “chauvinism” from him, after he was lionized for maintaining his obsessive devotion to Napoleonic France after being wounded 17 times in the line. It’s unclear if he was a real, historical figure or just a folk character, but either way, he became a real feature of the language. Since Napoleonic times, the sense of “chauvinisme” as excessive nationalist sentiment or jingoism has been usurped by a different sense, that of sexism.
“Male chauvinism” appropriates the derision of tribalist feelings of superiority about a regiment or nation and applies it to the battle of the sexes, but the metaphor works the same way. As Harvard scholars Jane Mansbridge and Katherine Flaster find in a critical sociology study of the phrase, “Particularly in the younger branch of the [second-wave feminist] movement, the children of former [American Communist Party] members who had picked up the term male chauvinist from their parents began using it in active feminist circles. The term caught on. In 1968, 1 article appeared in the New York Times using the word. The next year, 8 articles appeared. Then 48 articles the next year, and 76 the next. In 1972 the number soared to 130. After 1972, the number began to decrease, but relatively slowly, so that three decades later, an average of 26 or 27 articles per year still mentioned some form of male chauvinism.”
A word that comes from a person’s name is called an “eponym,” and chauvinism is hardly the only word we use without always realizing it is eponymous. “Nicotine” is another one that comes out of French and carries a bit of extra salience just now. Jean Nicot, a minor French diplomat under Charles IX, wrote about the healing power of tobacco, recently brought back over from the New World by Portuguese colonizers.
There are all kinds of eponyms hiding in our lexicon. The Bluetooth your headphones probably use is named for Danish king Harald Bluetooth, Viking uniter of Scandinavia, as a joke about the standardized tech protocol being accepted among a bunch of companies from Ericsson to Nokia in 1997. Then there’s shrapnel, the explosive “anti-personnel” burst of lead shot or other wounding material Nicolas Chauvin would have known only too well, named for the English artillery officer Henry Shrapnel (1761-1842), who invented its intentional use in the form of charges. Perhaps his relatives should change their names in shame, too.
